The Lovely Bones

As most of you already know, I love to read. I recently found a book called The Lovely Bones. It's the story of a girl who was murdered. She looks down on her family's and her murderer's life from heaven. The book is told from her perspective; it is her talking. The whole entire book was amazing. There were so many lines and paragraphs and even entire pages that made me think of Shane. While I was reading, at moments it would make me smile to think that he might be looking down on us and watching us live our lives just like this girl did. Then I got to the end, and there was a paragraph that hit home for me. She was summing it all up, she had figured it out.

"As I watched my family sip champagne, I thought about how their lives trailed backward and forward from my death....These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections - sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent - that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life."

I seriously had to stop reading and take a deep breath. It is so cool for me to think of Shane's impact on us in that way; that his body is living, in another way, through us. Every time I make a new connection & share my story with someone who has also lost their baby, everytime I hug Miles & Owen, & think of Shane, or everytime Mike holds me & we think of Shane together, those are all of his "bones" coming together, forming his body, his "new" life.

Throughout the book, the girl visits and stays with her family during the times that they need her most. When she sees that there is closure to a certain thing, she slips away. She compares this to a "woman in the back of a lecture hall or theater whom no one notices until she slips out...only those near the door themselves notice, to the rest it is like an unexplained breeze in a closed room."

She also talks about how sometimes she does things that stump the humans and leave them grateful. Her brother on earth had planted a garden, only he mixed flowers with vegetables and had no order to it whatsoever. His grandmother always hated it because she was trying to teach him how to plant things, but he didn't listen. He wanted to do it his way. One year his sister decided to come down and bloom all of his plants and flowers and weeds all at once, just to let him know she was there. That made me smile. In the fall of 2008, as Shane's 1st birthday was approaching, I asked him one day when I was leaving for work if he could just give me a sign, some small sign that he was there. Fall is usually a hard time for me, when the leaves are changing, it just brings back all those feelings again. When I got home from work the next morning, I noticed that our trees in the front yard were the only ones on our block that were full, from top to bottom, of these little white flowers. Some might call me crazy, but I took that as the sign.

I love books like this that make you notice all the little things. If you're looking for a good one to read, I would definitely pick this one up. There is also a movie version of the book coming out - you can see the preview here - http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/thelovelybones/. It looks excellent.

XOXO!